Tuesday, June 4, 2013

I met A. E. Van Vogt just as he was experiencing the first onset of Alzheimer's. I had been brimming with so many questions about the deeper psychological currents that run throughout The World of Null-A. A novel which starts when the hero realizes he is not the person he believed himself to be and so sets out on a quest to discover who he is, a quest that reaches a culmination of some profundity for a science fiction novel of the 1940s. It is no coincidence that the protagonist of this futuristic tale is named Gilbert Gosseyn (go sane). The method by which he does so is soundly based on the science of the time, involving a "cortical-thalamic pause" and the application of non-Aristotelian thinking. Van, alas, could shed no light on the writing of his earlier books or what the intentions behind them were. He had forgotten it all.

What I want to share with you here is a little known sidelight on the cover of an early hardcover edition of The World of Null-A.

Pulp magazine cover artists are never paid so well that they can afford to hire professional models. To make up for this lack, many artists, including the astounding Virgil Finley of Famous Fantastic Memories fame, copied photographs of movie stars because they were easy to come by free. Hence, if you will study below, you will see Marlon Brando as Van's mental superman, Boris Karloff as the villainous onlooker to his right, Barry Fitzgerald as the impish figure on the left, and a (by me) unidentified female star of the era on the right (though she is very familiar looking).

Alfred Elton van Vogt was always known to his friends as
"Van."Although affable and
easy to approach, he looked a trifle austere and I cannot recall ever seeing
him wear anything but a dark suit and what my husband liked to call a
"sincere" tie.His voice was a
pleasant baritone and he had a mellow laugh that seemed to spring from honest
surprise at humanity with all of its foibles. He was also a very handsome man,
tall, dark-haired, with a clean-cut profile.

In an era when most science fiction was of the "first
contact" sort, with cookie-cutter heroes battling rubber-suited aliens,
Van wrote about characters with intelligence, characters who had feelings and who understood cause and effect.His first published short story, "Black Destroyer," was a breakthrough that inspired a
host of tales with aliens that were more than mere cardboard cutouts for
the hero to knock down. I knew one science fiction enthusiast who named her
black tomcat Coeurl, the Black
Destroyer in person.

His landmark novel, "Slan," a story of people who
are human and yet different, gave us Jommy Cross and Kier Gray, unforgettable
type-characters for a generation of young science fiction readers.In some ways, "Slan" is a
coming-of-age novel, and Jommy Cross, who preceded him, is akin to Holden
Caulfield of "Catcher in the Rye." Although set in a science
fictional universe, "Slan" portrays a young boy who isalone, persecuted, and alienated from the
world around him. Kier Gray, initially seen as his nemesis, becomes at the end
a protective and kindred soul - very much a father figure.

The Weapon Shops series, with its slogan of "The right
to buy weapons is the right to be free," has echoes well into the present
day, when people are still debating gun ownership laws.Van's weapons, however, could only be used in
self-defense.As well as having a strong
sense of morality, Robert Hedrock, an immortal Weapon Shops protagonist, learns that his
actions have unavoidable consequences.Having married into the royal family in order to strengthen the genetic
line, he finds that genes which insure the continuation of the line have side
effects beyond his ability to change.

The characters in van Vogt's fiction are not the loveable
sort that a reader can cozy up to.They
tend to be super-human in their outlook and morality and they are always
supremely logical.

Van was a meticulous and methodical writer. The two books
that he cited as major influences in his writing career were "Narrative
Technique" by Thomas H. Uzzell (1934) and "The Only Two Ways to Write
a Story," by John Gallishaw (1930). He was extremely diligent in doing the
exercises printing in those books as he taught himself how to write, and
throughout his career he followed the precepts promoted by Uzzell and Gallishaw.(Both books are long out of print, but I
found used copies via the Internet.) Following their guidelines, Van wrote
books and stories that are tight and cohesive, without excess verbiage. He
wrote in 500 to 800 word blocks, each of which is structured like a short story
with its own complication and denouement, and he admitted to several of us that
he felt extremely uncomfortable if his plot did not follow that structure.Although it seems somewhat mechanical, this approach
results in logical writing with very strong plots.

Van had been involved with Dianetics, which was L. Ron
Hubbard's non-religious precursor to Scientology, and when I told him that I
was troubled by recurrent and unpleasant thoughts, to the point that I was
telling myself, "Don't think!" he was horrified.No, he told me.Never tell yourself not to think! The thing
to do was to pick a date in the future and every time I got caught in an
unpleasant mental turmoil,put it off by
promising to think about it on that future date.I did as he suggested and was delighted to
find that it worked quite well.When I
told him so, he was very pleased and pointed out that it was an exercise from
his Dianetics training.

Van's first wife, E. Mayne Hull, was devoted to his
interests.She was brilliant, lively,
and a pleasure to be around. They had a nice
home in the Hollywood Hills and I remember that their sunny kitchen held her
collection of African violets. In the sitting room were a dark wood screen,
heavily ornamented, and some deeply carved and amazingly uncomfortable Chinese
chairs, inherited from a relative. When Mayne died of cancer in 1975, after
thirty-six years of marriage, Van was distraught.Not a religious man, he none the less
cherished a hope that there was some kind of survival after death, and he had
her tombstone inscribed with the pet names he had known her by, as well as her
full legal name. He said it was so that if she did survive in spirit and was by
chance lost and wandering, she could find a resting place and an anchor there.

Several years after Mayne's death, Van married Lydia
Bereginsky, a charming and very lovely court
reporter.Lydia was acutely aware of
Van's political position, as stated in his Null-A and Weapon Shops novels, and
when a group of us made plans for a two-week tour of the USSR she tearfully
dissuaded him from going along, being certain that he would be arrested upon
arrival and never allowed to return to the United States. She may have been
right; in any case Van decided to forgo the trip.

Unfortunately the last years of his life were marred by
Alzheimer's Disease.The last time I saw
him was in the early 1990s, at one of Forry Ackerman's parties. Lovingly tended
by Lydia, it was obvious that he did not know where he was or why, and had no
idea who any of us were.It was a sad
end for a brilliant intellect.

J. D. Crayne is the author of the Captain Spycer send-ups of rip-roaring space opera for Futures-Past Editions, and of cozy mysteries, including the Mark Stoddard series for Deerstalker Editions.

An omnibus book edition of her feline detective novels featuring "Lucky Pierre," Three Cat Mysteries, is available free via the Amazon Lending
Library for all Amazon Prime Members. And the price has been slashed to
$3.99, which is a lot of cat mystery for the price.

Futures-Past Editions publishes science fiction, fantasy, adventure, pulp, and more in five ebook formats. You'll find books carefully selected from the best contemporary authors and the great masters of the past.